Is there any good horror anymore?

[Anonymous No.22262483]

I just bought Johnny Compton's "Spite House" and had to return it, it was so bad. A few pages in, it says something about "bigotry" in Texas, and then the main character is revealed to be black. I flipped to the back, and sure enough, the author was black. So I keep reading anyway, and it's all about how racist everybody is, and long-winded about a man and his two daughters and family stuff, feeling really amateurish and not horror. So I looked up reviews, which I should have done before, and everyone's saying it's not a horror novel, it's a family novel with some gothic tropes thrown in. Fuck! So I returned it for a refund.

So then I started looking for something else new from the last few years, and everything in the "Top Horror" lists was either family drama; humor horror; Marvel-style good guys vs. bad guys—good guys win; or childhood trauma healing. Yuck! I don't want to read safe-space books for the mentally fragile who want to order spicy food but don't actually want it hot. I want horror that goes as far as it can go in a horror direction. I also saw in a lot of reviews: "This book really needed some trigger warnings." P-fucking-uke! Where the fuck am I?

So is anyone writing actual horror these days without paying any notice to all the crybaby whiny shit going on in the broader culture?

[Anonymous No.22262486]

>>22262483
Brian Evanson

[Anonymous No.22262497]

>>22262483
>I don't want to read safe-space books for the mentally fragile who want to order spicy food but don't actually want it hot.
And yet you freaked out when a black author talked about racism. Magatards are some of the most fragile people on earth

[Anonymous No.22262503]

>>22262483
It also doesn't work because "bigotry" or "racism" is something a black person would resent rather than fear.

[Anonymous No.22262519]

>>22262503
I don't think the bigotry was actually part of the plot. It was more a backdrop of the setting, just something he wanted to get in there, aside from the story. I didn't read far, but that's how it felt: let's cram my politics into a story about something completely different.

[Anonymous No.22262522]

Look into Splatterpunk or Extreme Horror sub genres.
Honestly I feel like horror as a genre is booming but you do got to be careful there's a lot of "amplifying minority voices" and shit going on.

[Anonymous No.22262550]

>>22262522
I think I noticed that. Some of the Top Horror of the Year titles: Mexican Gothic, Pinata, Loteria, The Hacienda, Monstrilio. Is it really horror, or just DIE cram-ins?

[Anonymous No.22262601]

>>22262550
I couldn't say I've avoided all of those books lmao.
I might read Monstrilio one day though, I need to read more reviews on it first.

[Anonymous No.22262624]

>>22262522
Drop a chart of splatterpunk and extreme horror

>>22262483
How's the prose ?

[Anonymous No.22262691]

>>22262624
The prose is bad: clunky, childish, barely sufficing but also overwritten. I got a very YA feel from it. There was nothing dark or atmospheric up to the point I quit, though that may have come later (it is about a haunted house). Lots of irrelevant details are thrown in. Positive thinking cliches: she was strong and never gave up. It just came right out and said that rather than showing it at some point.

I'd be interested to hear others' views on that if they can get hold of a copy for review and read the first 15 pages.

[Anonymous No.22262692]

>>22262624
I don't think such a chart exists.

[Anonymous No.22262846]

>>22262691
I actually almost bought the book, the name and cover looked cool nut unlike you I actually read the reviews first :^)

[Anonymous No.22263500]

>>22262483
I've never been scared by a book but I have felt tension and dread

Koja's Cipher and B.R.Yeager's Negative Space, where you want to just shake the characters hard and snap them out of their shit.

[Anonymous No.22263517]

I'm almost halfway through this and it's empty and dull. I will finish it only on principle. Maybe I should've chosen crime or sci fi as my "dumb" book this week. Can't believe it's been favorably rated. Ratings mean nothing in society right now.

[Anonymous No.22263534]

Hint: You are living in a cargo cult version of your own society. You think you're living in 1950s Western Society + 70 years, but you are living in mid-6th century post-Roman Britain compared to Pax Romana Rome. Except, unlike in post-Roman Britain, where everybody at least knew and admitted that Roman civilization was gone, it's as if everybody is still walking tying dirty shitstained bedsheets improperly into togas and saying two words of Latin to each other and claiming it's still 125 AD.

You are not living in a real world anymore, you are living in a completely new barbarian one in the ruins of the real one. The ruins just hold up really well because the real people built stuff to last, but the first cracks are beginning to show, and within another decade or two, as city infrastructures pass a breaking point of decay and Detroitification becomes a lightning bolt that can hit your "historic" city in a 2-3 year period of riots and capital flight, even relatively stupid, average joes will have the "ohhhhh...!" realization that they've been living in ruins for a long time now, and that it was merely an accident that Detroit tier urban jungle conditions were delayed and things still seemed pretty much the same because "people in 1936 drove cars; we drive cars; what's the difference, aside from a few superficials?"

You should NOT critique individual aspects of a cargo cult, like the fact that a certain subset of the tribal barbarian society you now live in chooses to call themselves "authors" and awkwardly transcribe things from its pre-literate oral consciousness on paper using (again) residual, mostly automated and thus temporarily still functioning printing presses. You should not evaluate the specific ways in which they act like stupid mockeries of real people who used to do real things. You can train an apeman savage to drive a bus, throw a ball, wear a toga, make movies, or enter data into user-friendly candy-colored computer programs, as long as the machines still exist for making and maintaining buses, balls, cloth, cameras, and computers. The same goes for abstract and notional things like cultural activities: you can train an apeman to pretend he's a poet, or an academic, or a horror story author. He may even have a working vocabulary that allows him to simulate being literate at a distance, kind of like how NPCs in a video game simulate the background bustle of a city until you look directly at them or try to interact with them.

When living in a cargo cult, try to isolate yourself from tribal dynamics or leave the situation entirely. If you can't do that, try only to consume things created by the real people, before the cargo cultification set in. Rule of thumb: The 90s was the last decade with people still doing productive work yet old enough to have been raised by real humans and thus to be real or semi-real themselves.

[Anonymous No.22263569]

>>22263534
Somebody's been reading After Virtue.

[Anonymous No.22263595]

>>22263517
I've seen that one on the top of a bunch of lists. Maybe the good books are actually at the bottom of the lists.

[Anonymous No.22263618]

>>22263595
Maybe horror isn't a genre for me.

[Anonymous No.22263632]

>>22263534
I think the saddest thing isn't even the fact of the fall but the fact that nobody and nothing is going to come to save this civilization from itself, unlike what many would wish to believe. I see a really long and extraordinarily cold winter coming, one that will easily put the era of the franks and the goths to shame with how far it will fall from its former glory, and how long it will fall. That is, if there is a bottom to this pit to begin with.

[Anonymous No.22263652]

>>22263618
Try this. It's short stories, which is easier for the genre.

[Anonymous No.22263688]

Ligotti novels are good

[Anonymous No.22263705]

>>22263632
Literature has the potential to challenge this stagnation, given literature's relatively low expense and thus openness to individual efforts, rather than requiring teams of producers, key grips, etc., who all need to get paid by people who have money and who treasure the status quo.

What we need is a phase of critique and subversion. Many of the motifs in current literature started out themselves as critiques of a previous system but have now ossified into a new system stricter than the one before. That system is now itself in need of critiquing, deconstruction, and subversion. That system began by overthrowing a set of sacred cows, but now it is self-satisfied with its own sacred cows. Now those need toppling.

[Anonymous No.22263845]

>>22263652
I'll give it a shot thanks

[Anonymous No.22263849]

Anything from this series

[Anonymous No.22263955]

>>22262483
I would recommend Adam Nevill. Pic related is probably his best known, and it's really good innawoods horror. Last Days is also great. And he's noticeably non-pozzed.

[Anonymous No.22264212]

We need to return to crab